I dunno, man, I just don't see people accepting a computer taking over for work that humans are used to doing - we tend to resist such changes to our status quo, and rather strongly.
And yet it has inevitably happened time after time. What makes you think this will be any different?
Just as there are situations where human drivers are unable to cope. Except:
1) there are probably fewer that an ever increasing intelligent self-driving system would not be able to handle
2) these situations will diminish since these minor roads will evolve to be more autobot friendly (just as they once became more automobile (rather than horse) friendly
3) in those rare extreme conditions a remote driver can take over
As a practical matter, you're right, but that doesn't mean we should just roll over and accept it. The logical extensions of this policy are so far reaching that it would make our lives extremely constrained so we need to push back on this individually or collectively wherever possible.
Bingo. It's amazing that 200 other posters in this thread seem to think that any pilot, even a junior Korean pilot, would actually let 200 people due to his respect for authority.
That same day a bus crashed while driving from NYC to Boston and those passengers never reached their destination. In other words, your anecdote is meaningless - planes are still faster than buses.
eBooks can be more convenient. They are currently not more convenient. The reason they are not more convenient is because the implementation of DRM negates a huge number of benefits that eBooks(as files) posess, but are unable to realize.
You keep conflating the two interpretations of "more convenient". Is an apple more convenient than an orange? You could certainly make that point as you don't have to peel an apple to eat. An apple would be even more convenient if it didn't have a core that was hard to eat or had to be thrown out afterwards.
If you take out DRM from eBooks, I have zero complaints which are not just byproducts of the medium. ie: Physical books require light to read, occupy space, etc; eBooks require electricity, require support equipment, etc.
The list goes on,..., ebooks can be bought instantly, often in places where the physical books are not available; ebooks can be stored on multiple devices, I can read the same book on the subway as I'm reading on my bedside; I can easily find the ebook rather than looking for which shelf or in which box I put it or which friend I loaned it to; I can travel with 50 different ebooks in my carryon rather than 1; I can instantly look up a definition, a translation, do a text search on the book, see all references to a character or place; I can easily read with one hand or lay it on a flat surface (for workouts, bath tub,...); I can receive corrections and updates to the ebook automatically; and several more.
None of these features are "negated" by DRM. For you, personally, DRM is big issue, but it is clearly not for a huge number of people. All the problems you mention are trivial to me and many others and I expect you're exaggerating them for yourself as well. Let me address your issue with "Here is what an eBook is and this is what you can do with it." I primarily use Amazon, so I can easily tell you that it performs 99% of what I would do with a physical book right now and does a hell of a lot more. I have absolute confidence that I will still be able to read that eBook on any number of devices in a few months and I have little doubt that I will be able to access that book in 3, 5, 10 years. I even have a reasonable chance of being able to read that eBook in 20 or 50 years.
No, I don't know that every specific feature will remain the same, but I don't care (much) as long as the primary function still works, which it has a very high probability of doing in the near future and decent probability in long term. About as high (in the case of Amazon, at least) as it would for a physical book, actually.
In the rare case I want to "loan" a book to a friend I can send him a link electronically and he can download a copy of the eBook himself for a fee (which may very well be the same fee that I paid). All without the hassle of driving over to his house to hand the physical book, keeping track of it so I can pester him to give it back when he's done, only to find that he it's got coffee stains and many of the pages are wrinkled because he read it in the bath.
Paper books and eBooks are not the same, they don't have to do everything that the other does for them to be tremendously useful - this includes loaning or reselling. It would be great if eBooks also had those features, but that is a bonus, not a requirement. If you can figure out a way to get rid of the DRM while still protecting the publishers and booksellers, I suggest you let them know. They're not idiots and they're only as greedy as every other for-profit business - it's just that this is a difficult problem with no easy solution. The absolute freedom and guarantee you demand is not reasonable and you wouldn't want to pay the high cost to pay for it.
Am I exaggerating? A little... No wait, I'm not exaggerating at all...
Well yes, you are exaggerating. A lot.
For every example you have that a printed book is more convenient there is another example where the eBook is more convenient. There is a use case for both, and some may prefer one over the other, but that does not warrant this one sided rant. If you want to argue that eBooks could be even more convenient, then be my guest - there is certainly room for improvement.
So you think that because men and women are biologically different, they should be paid different amounts for the same work?
It's curious that all the clever people like yourself who have figured this out haven't capitalized on this insight by creating businesses that hire these underpaid women and thus dominate their competition.
If you don't live in that town, you vote for state representatives who set standards for traffic speed, lights and signage. Again, this has nothing to do with automated enforcement, it is equally true for your good old fashioned style speed trap too.
If you don't live in the state, then you look to the federal government to set reasonable state standards. In the worst case you avoid such a corrupt, backwater state altogether.
What is your solution? Complain about it on the internet?
You apparently need to decide whether you are going to drive slower than regular traffic so you can stop in a reasonable time and distance - which might cause a hazard for those driving recklessly around you. Or you drive at the speed of other traffic and pray that you can stop before crashing into someone else.
Between those two, I think the reasonable driver would take option of not being the immediate cause of the accident, i.e. the first option.
Seriously? If it takes you more than five seconds to enter the intersection after the light changes to green then perhaps you should let someone else drive. Either that or your car is unsafe to drive in the conditions you're citing.
Perhaps you are confused that you must completely leave the intersection before the light turns red, but this is not what it means to "run a red light" and you won't get ticketed for the situation here by any reasonable officer or legal red light camera. Even then you would have had 5 seconds of green, plus several seconds of yellow to get through the intersection, which is more than reasonable.
A good driver can pay attention to the traffic around them AND start paying attention to the light that is a few hundred feet in front of them. It shouldn't be a requirement, the yellow should still be long enough for a minimally competent driver, but please don't claim that it is impossible or unsafe to have some feel for the timing of the upcoming light. If you are completely unaware of a light until it turns yellow then you are not even that minimally competent driver.
The city that collects the fines sets the length of the yellow light. Now do you see the problem?
This problem is inherent in every aspect of government, so it's not an argument against automated traffic law enforcement. It's an argument for better governance which is maintained by voting for efficient and honest representatives and by the court system when they get too far out of line (as seems to be the case here).
He's not "equating" it, he's saying it's a factor. The fallacy of your argument is that YOU are equating anyone who believes one false thing to others who believe a different false thing (e.g. believing that the holocaust didn't happen vs. believing that one side of the moon is always dark).
You could use this absurd kind of extreme to mock any proposal you don't agree with. There is no perfect security system, so why ever bother locking your doors or taking attendance in any form or...?
One problem is that you've already enlisted an accomplice in this scheme and unless she is a master criminal and perfect liar she will be a weak link. Another problem is that you might get away with it sometimes, but it is deeply flawed and high risk.
In the first case, the teacher doesn't have to notice that Jimmy isn't there physically every time (BOO!), he just has to notice it once and the scheme is ruined and two students are in serious trouble. What about the classes that she doesn't share with Jimmy? Is she handing the ID over to other friends (an even bigger, more flawed conspiracy). Is she shielding the card when she's at her own classes and does she know enough about the system to ensure that red flags aren't popping up from the unusual behavior?
In the second case, do you really think the police will be that stupid? Maybe sometimes, but in most cases they will not just blindly look at attendance records, they will talk to the other students ("Jimmy, no haven't seen him in this class for weeks."), and they will talk to the girlfriend who will break down and rat him out.
That is a philosophical argument, not a practical one. Calling them "selfish bastards" is just shorthand for "companies who made business decisions I find to be unfair and/or evil." Then we treat them as such by punishing them in the market (or legal system). Without that feedback mechanism we would devolve into the baby killing/eating scenario posted by another.
One drawback of CFL lamps is that they die more quickly in environments where they're frequently turned on and off.
They die more quickly than they otherwise would, not more quickly than an incandescent.
When I'm in there, I'm usually in there for five minutes at a time; I love cheap incandescents for those areas.
Why hoard then? At the usage you quote your existing bulbs will last another 10 years or more, plus you have the handful from the lamps you replaced with CFLs to replace them with.
It may not be practical to have a different limit for everyone, but that doesn't mean that different people don't have different tolerances and other risk behaviors. You choose not to answer the hypothetical question, which is a common copout. Some drivers at.10 are safer than others at.05. The overall weight is irrelevant, however, unless the metric you're using is number of drinks.
So you also believe that murder and manslaughter are equivalent. Your semantic fuzziness weaken whatever moral point you are intending to make here.
Those people are by definition unreasonable, and as such have to be smacked into doing the right thing.
In other words, anyone less righteous than you.
No business has to operate out of a 200 year old building. If they choose to, there will be many added costs.
Why not tear it down and build an entirely new building? Sure, but that would cost more than $50,000, don't you think? Are you really just that incompetent at math and business?
There's plenty of money to cut from the military budget to do all of those things.
Of course, just eliminate the military budget and everything else is suddenly free. I'm looking forward to the the immortality and bountiful lifestyle that you guarantee. Free money from whatever business you think is undercharging, free money from government programs you don't agree with. Your world is refreshingly simple.
It's exactly what we're talking about here. He wants it to be legal for businesses to intentionally design things to exclude the disabled.
That is a ridiculous exaggeration. There is a huge difference between intentionally excluding the disabled and not taking their needs into consideration. Further, it's not even that they didn't consider it, it's that they would consider it and find the cost excessive. This kind of hyperbole is why many reasonable people who would otherwise support access for the disabled are turned off by it.
If a ramp costs $50,000, it's because they didn't properly plan access ahead of time. The cost isn't in the ramp, but the lack of forethought.
Yes, they should have planned that ramp 200 years ago when the building was originally built. Hindsight is wonderful.
I'd rather spend $100 million to cure a child of cancer than to buy a fighter jet. Don't tell me we allocate resources in fair, practical, or even sensible ways.
Is that really the only choice? I'd rather use that $100M to save 20 lives by reducing pollution, having higher food or safety standards, et al. But if you want to be selfish and kill those 20 to save your kid, I guess I can understand.
Perhaps if he were arguing for euthanasia or erecting new barricades to intentionally prevent the handicapped from getting around you might have a point. But that is very far from what we're talking about here.
As a society, we ALL have to work out how we distribute our limited resources in a fair, but practical way. Should we spend $100M to cure your child of a rare cancer? Of course not, and suggesting that you (the father of the child) are the only one who gets to make that decision is crazy.
Putting in a $50K ramp MAY also be crazy depending on the circumstances.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, man, I just don't see people accepting a computer taking over for work that humans are used to doing - we tend to resist such changes to our status quo, and rather strongly.
And yet it has inevitably happened time after time. What makes you think this will be any different?
Just as there are situations where human drivers are unable to cope. Except:
1) there are probably fewer that an ever increasing intelligent self-driving system would not be able to handle
2) these situations will diminish since these minor roads will evolve to be more autobot friendly (just as they once became more automobile (rather than horse) friendly
3) in those rare extreme conditions a remote driver can take over
As a practical matter, you're right, but that doesn't mean we should just roll over and accept it. The logical extensions of this policy are so far reaching that it would make our lives extremely constrained so we need to push back on this individually or collectively wherever possible.
Bingo. It's amazing that 200 other posters in this thread seem to think that any pilot, even a junior Korean pilot, would actually let 200 people due to his respect for authority.
That same day a bus crashed while driving from NYC to Boston and those passengers never reached their destination. In other words, your anecdote is meaningless - planes are still faster than buses.
eBooks can be more convenient. They are currently not more convenient. The reason they are not more convenient is because the implementation of DRM negates a huge number of benefits that eBooks(as files) posess, but are unable to realize.
You keep conflating the two interpretations of "more convenient". Is an apple more convenient than an orange? You could certainly make that point as you don't have to peel an apple to eat. An apple would be even more convenient if it didn't have a core that was hard to eat or had to be thrown out afterwards.
If you take out DRM from eBooks, I have zero complaints which are not just byproducts of the medium. ie: Physical books require light to read, occupy space, etc; eBooks require electricity, require support equipment, etc.
The list goes on, ..., ebooks can be bought instantly, often in places where the physical books are not available; ebooks can be stored on multiple devices, I can read the same book on the subway as I'm reading on my bedside; I can easily find the ebook rather than looking for which shelf or in which box I put it or which friend I loaned it to; I can travel with 50 different ebooks in my carryon rather than 1; I can instantly look up a definition, a translation, do a text search on the book, see all references to a character or place; I can easily read with one hand or lay it on a flat surface (for workouts, bath tub, ...); I can receive corrections and updates to the ebook automatically; and several more.
None of these features are "negated" by DRM. For you, personally, DRM is big issue, but it is clearly not for a huge number of people. All the problems you mention are trivial to me and many others and I expect you're exaggerating them for yourself as well. Let me address your issue with "Here is what an eBook is and this is what you can do with it." I primarily use Amazon, so I can easily tell you that it performs 99% of what I would do with a physical book right now and does a hell of a lot more. I have absolute confidence that I will still be able to read that eBook on any number of devices in a few months and I have little doubt that I will be able to access that book in 3, 5, 10 years. I even have a reasonable chance of being able to read that eBook in 20 or 50 years.
No, I don't know that every specific feature will remain the same, but I don't care (much) as long as the primary function still works, which it has a very high probability of doing in the near future and decent probability in long term. About as high (in the case of Amazon, at least) as it would for a physical book, actually.
In the rare case I want to "loan" a book to a friend I can send him a link electronically and he can download a copy of the eBook himself for a fee (which may very well be the same fee that I paid). All without the hassle of driving over to his house to hand the physical book, keeping track of it so I can pester him to give it back when he's done, only to find that he it's got coffee stains and many of the pages are wrinkled because he read it in the bath.
Paper books and eBooks are not the same, they don't have to do everything that the other does for them to be tremendously useful - this includes loaning or reselling. It would be great if eBooks also had those features, but that is a bonus, not a requirement. If you can figure out a way to get rid of the DRM while still protecting the publishers and booksellers, I suggest you let them know. They're not idiots and they're only as greedy as every other for-profit business - it's just that this is a difficult problem with no easy solution. The absolute freedom and guarantee you demand is not reasonable and you wouldn't want to pay the high cost to pay for it.
Am I exaggerating? A little... No wait, I'm not exaggerating at all...
Well yes, you are exaggerating. A lot.
For every example you have that a printed book is more convenient there is another example where the eBook is more convenient. There is a use case for both, and some may prefer one over the other, but that does not warrant this one sided rant. If you want to argue that eBooks could be even more convenient, then be my guest - there is certainly room for improvement.
Ok let's test you theory:
Nicely done. Your rigorous analysis sure proved him wrong.
It takes skill, hard work, ruthless ambition and extreme good luck to get rich and stay there.
Is it okay if we use your method on your own theory?
Paris Hilton - nope
George Bush - nope
So you think that because men and women are biologically different, they should be paid different amounts for the same work?
It's curious that all the clever people like yourself who have figured this out haven't capitalized on this insight by creating businesses that hire these underpaid women and thus dominate their competition.
If you don't live in that town, you vote for state representatives who set standards for traffic speed, lights and signage. Again, this has nothing to do with automated enforcement, it is equally true for your good old fashioned style speed trap too.
If you don't live in the state, then you look to the federal government to set reasonable state standards. In the worst case you avoid such a corrupt, backwater state altogether.
What is your solution? Complain about it on the internet?
Driving a horse trailer is the safety hazard.
You apparently need to decide whether you are going to drive slower than regular traffic so you can stop in a reasonable time and distance - which might cause a hazard for those driving recklessly around you. Or you drive at the speed of other traffic and pray that you can stop before crashing into someone else.
Between those two, I think the reasonable driver would take option of not being the immediate cause of the accident, i.e. the first option.
Seriously? If it takes you more than five seconds to enter the intersection after the light changes to green then perhaps you should let someone else drive. Either that or your car is unsafe to drive in the conditions you're citing.
Perhaps you are confused that you must completely leave the intersection before the light turns red, but this is not what it means to "run a red light" and you won't get ticketed for the situation here by any reasonable officer or legal red light camera. Even then you would have had 5 seconds of green, plus several seconds of yellow to get through the intersection, which is more than reasonable.
A good driver can pay attention to the traffic around them AND start paying attention to the light that is a few hundred feet in front of them. It shouldn't be a requirement, the yellow should still be long enough for a minimally competent driver, but please don't claim that it is impossible or unsafe to have some feel for the timing of the upcoming light. If you are completely unaware of a light until it turns yellow then you are not even that minimally competent driver.
The city that collects the fines sets the length of the yellow light. Now do you see the problem?
This problem is inherent in every aspect of government, so it's not an argument against automated traffic law enforcement. It's an argument for better governance which is maintained by voting for efficient and honest representatives and by the court system when they get too far out of line (as seems to be the case here).
He's not "equating" it, he's saying it's a factor. The fallacy of your argument is that YOU are equating anyone who believes one false thing to others who believe a different false thing (e.g. believing that the holocaust didn't happen vs. believing that one side of the moon is always dark).
You could use this absurd kind of extreme to mock any proposal you don't agree with. There is no perfect security system, so why ever bother locking your doors or taking attendance in any form or ...?
One problem is that you've already enlisted an accomplice in this scheme and unless she is a master criminal and perfect liar she will be a weak link. Another problem is that you might get away with it sometimes, but it is deeply flawed and high risk.
In the first case, the teacher doesn't have to notice that Jimmy isn't there physically every time (BOO!), he just has to notice it once and the scheme is ruined and two students are in serious trouble. What about the classes that she doesn't share with Jimmy? Is she handing the ID over to other friends (an even bigger, more flawed conspiracy). Is she shielding the card when she's at her own classes and does she know enough about the system to ensure that red flags aren't popping up from the unusual behavior?
In the second case, do you really think the police will be that stupid? Maybe sometimes, but in most cases they will not just blindly look at attendance records, they will talk to the other students ("Jimmy, no haven't seen him in this class for weeks."), and they will talk to the girlfriend who will break down and rat him out.
That is a philosophical argument, not a practical one. Calling them "selfish bastards" is just shorthand for "companies who made business decisions I find to be unfair and/or evil." Then we treat them as such by punishing them in the market (or legal system). Without that feedback mechanism we would devolve into the baby killing/eating scenario posted by another.
All of those are meaningless unless they lead to more profit and increased share price.
Not dying in a car crash?
One drawback of CFL lamps is that they die more quickly in environments where they're frequently turned on and off .
They die more quickly than they otherwise would, not more quickly than an incandescent.
When I'm in there, I'm usually in there for five minutes at a time; I love cheap incandescents for those areas.
Why hoard then? At the usage you quote your existing bulbs will last another 10 years or more, plus you have the handful from the lamps you replaced with CFLs to replace them with.
and you only know 6 people?
It may not be practical to have a different limit for everyone, but that doesn't mean that different people don't have different tolerances and other risk behaviors. You choose not to answer the hypothetical question, which is a common copout. Some drivers at .10 are safer than others at .05. The overall weight is irrelevant, however, unless the metric you're using is number of drinks.
Nope, it amounts to exactly the same thing.
So you also believe that murder and manslaughter are equivalent. Your semantic fuzziness weaken whatever moral point you are intending to make here.
Those people are by definition unreasonable, and as such have to be smacked into doing the right thing.
In other words, anyone less righteous than you.
No business has to operate out of a 200 year old building. If they choose to, there will be many added costs.
Why not tear it down and build an entirely new building? Sure, but that would cost more than $50,000, don't you think? Are you really just that incompetent at math and business?
There's plenty of money to cut from the military budget to do all of those things.
Of course, just eliminate the military budget and everything else is suddenly free. I'm looking forward to the the immortality and bountiful lifestyle that you guarantee. Free money from whatever business you think is undercharging, free money from government programs you don't agree with. Your world is refreshingly simple.
It's exactly what we're talking about here. He wants it to be legal for businesses to intentionally design things to exclude the disabled.
That is a ridiculous exaggeration. There is a huge difference between intentionally excluding the disabled and not taking their needs into consideration. Further, it's not even that they didn't consider it, it's that they would consider it and find the cost excessive. This kind of hyperbole is why many reasonable people who would otherwise support access for the disabled are turned off by it.
If a ramp costs $50,000, it's because they didn't properly plan access ahead of time. The cost isn't in the ramp, but the lack of forethought.
Yes, they should have planned that ramp 200 years ago when the building was originally built. Hindsight is wonderful.
I'd rather spend $100 million to cure a child of cancer than to buy a fighter jet. Don't tell me we allocate resources in fair, practical, or even sensible ways.
Is that really the only choice? I'd rather use that $100M to save 20 lives by reducing pollution, having higher food or safety standards, et al. But if you want to be selfish and kill those 20 to save your kid, I guess I can understand.
Perhaps if he were arguing for euthanasia or erecting new barricades to intentionally prevent the handicapped from getting around you might have a point. But that is very far from what we're talking about here.
As a society, we ALL have to work out how we distribute our limited resources in a fair, but practical way. Should we spend $100M to cure your child of a rare cancer? Of course not, and suggesting that you (the father of the child) are the only one who gets to make that decision is crazy.
Putting in a $50K ramp MAY also be crazy depending on the circumstances.